In the sumer of 2008, Fred Brinkman invited me to be a speaker at Euromnis 2008. Euromnis is an annual conference, most often held in Netherland, for Omnis developers. The most prominent experts in Omnis and related subjects come together to hold sessions for interested participants in the Omnis community. We had been working with LTSP in Iceland (in a school in Akureyri) and checked out how Omnis works within that environment. There was considerable interest in this technology and I put it into context for Omnis users at the conference.

The speakers come from all over the world and this is therefore quite a melting pot of experience and ideas. When Euromnis 2009 drew near I was called on again but this time I was far enough along with development of the Remote Application Server to show participants an installation of the service with Omnis applications, both Omnis 7 and Studio 5.

It is safe to say that this technology invoked interest at the conference, enough to inspire us to continue development. Ikon has recently taken into service two Application Servers hosted at Basis, an Icelandic service provider specialized in Linux and Unix systems. People were pleasantly surprised to see that it was possible to work with Omnis applications on screen all the way from Iceland as if they were running locally.

The technology is mostly based on Open Source software. Service recipients subscribe for a moderate fee to first class software without committing to large sums of expenses up front or taking any risks. Concerns about data security are a thing of the past as the systems are hosted in a secure environment with first class backup systems and all the multiple redundancy associated with secure data centers.

Olafur Gardarsson